


and i'll take it alone

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 10:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10512297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Rachel Duncan, age sixteen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: referenced sex with dubious consent]
> 
> Happy birthday, Rachel!

i.

She isn’t nervous.

Rachel has been walking the halls of the DYAD building for almost ten years, now, give or take – disregarding the absence in the middle – and she refuses to be intimidated in what is essentially her home. She’s never been to this level of the building, this high in the elevator, but that doesn’t matter; this is _hers_ , all of it, and she refuses to be frightened.

She isn’t frightened. She isn’t nervous. Her hands are still where they are folded in front of her. She isn’t sweating – not that she would be, in the artificial chill of DYAD Institute’s main building. But she isn’t. She is still as stone.

The elevator chimes soothingly and she steps out, her footsteps reassuringly loud on the floor. Aldous steps out behind her.

“Nervous?” he says, as they walk. “This is your first meeting.”

She doesn’t even deign to offer a response.

ii.

Her bedroom is exactly the same as she’d left it, when she comes back from boarding school. (Losses: the weight of her braids. Gains:)

(Well, she’d gained something, surely. Besides knowledge, besides isolation hollowing out the inside of her chest into something glacial and still. She’d gained something. She’ll think of it. In time.)

(Gains:)

It’s still pink. She hadn’t liked pink when she first arrived at DYAD, and she doesn’t like it now. And yet they keep offering it to her – as if, should they make the bedspread viciously fuchsia enough, it’ll keep her from noticing the dinged and scuffed metal of the walls.

It doesn’t. Her latest monitor puts her bags down next to the bed and leaves, closing the door behind him. At boarding school Rachel had managed – with difficulty – to remove the mirror from the wall of her room; there had been a microphone tucked between it and the wall, but there had been a wall there. She had put the mirror back.

She wouldn’t be able to do the same here, in this room, with this mirror. She knows what’s behind it. Of course she knows.

So here she is, standing in the room that has been hers since the Duncan family burned in a fire. She should feel something about this, probably. It seems like she should.

Instead she opens up her wardrobe, sees the shirts and skirts in the sizes that she’d ordered hanging neatly in rows. She sighs through her nose and starts unbuttoning her shirt. Might as well change out of uniform.

iii.

They think she’s a child. They all do – even (or perhaps especially) Aldous. The members of the board are decades older than her, and they look at her and see an infant more needing of a coloring book than a brief on the latest topic of discussion. Her monitors view themselves as glorified babysitters. Rachel walks through the building and everyone’s eyes land on her just long enough to establish her as a foreign curiosity before they dart away again.

Every day Rachel builds a scream in her chest; she carefully prunes the edges of it until it is something shining and metallic and round, loud enough to shatter all the windows. She holds it in the pit of her throat. Right above her chest.

Every single day she swallows it down. Her stomach is a wishing well of old angers. She’s so tired of this – she’s _so tired_ – and the worst part is that this is the rest of her life. There is never going to be a time when Rachel can scream. She could pass every test ever set for her, and she will never _once_ be able to open her mouth and let what she’s feeling out.

iv.

She touches herself in the dark.

v.

Aldous’ desk is a clutter of notes, his brand-new laptop computer whirring discontentedly to itself on top of a pile of hurried shorthand. Aldous is looking at Rachel over the steeple of his fingers. Rachel looks back, for a moment, and then drops her eyes back to the papers.

When he notices her looking he shuffles them into a pile and flips them pointedly upside-down. “Rachel,” he says.

“Aldous.”

“Your monitor says you tried to kiss him.”

Now she raises her gaze back to his. “He liked it.”

“Rachel,” Aldous says, pinching the bridge of his nose, “you can’t—”

“Why not,” Rachel says, leaning forward slightly. “What do you suggest, Aldous? The rousing amount of other teenagers in the Institute’s building? Or should I lean across the table at a board meeting and—”

“I’m _suggesting_ ,” Aldous hisses between his teeth, “that there’s no _rush_ to this, Rachel. Wait until you’re grown and, for heaven’s sakes, consider the lawsuits.”

Rachel screams. It’s gone before she can catch it.

“I don’t want to wait,” she says slowly, clearly, each word carefully measured between her teeth. “I wanted to kiss him. I kissed him. It was mutually enjoyable.

“And don’t,” she adds, “act as if there will be a lawsuit. As if the DYAD would let that happen. Security dipping its pen into company ink? Into the company _product?_ Imagine the scandal.”

Aldous is silent. Rachel takes the time to study him. He has more wrinkles than he did when she first met him. She wonders how many of them are hers. When he goes home at night, does he lie awake in the dark and worry about her? Does she want him to?

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” he says. “We’ve made you grow up too fast, haven’t we.”

Oh.

Oh, what a patronizing thing.

Her monitor did enjoy it when she kissed him, and when she does it again he’ll probably enjoy that too. She’ll take him back to her bedroom. She’ll kiss him in front of the mirror, under the bright hum of the fluorescent lights. He’ll want her.

The desk chair screeches slightly on the ground when Rachel shoves it behind her, stands up, and leaves Aldous’ office.

vi.

Her latest tutor tells her about intracellular compartments and protein sorting. Rachel stares out the window and watches the buildings, the people scurrying by on the ground. In theory she owns it, but when will she own it. She draws half-remembered faces in the margins of her notes and then slowly and systematically crosses them all out.

vii.

Rachel is confined to her room after certain hours – the door might be locked, but she wouldn’t know. She hasn’t checked it. She sits on her bed and lays out paperwork until the soft pink bedspread is covered with typed-out statistics. One foot dangling towards the floor. Her toenails are unpainted; she’ll paint them soon, once she chooses a color. For now she curls both legs underneath her so you can’t see her toenails at all. She scrawls notes in the margins of the latest meeting’s minutes. Is this her home? This room? Is this what home is?

She looks up from the bed and looks around: the walls, the floor, the mirror, the teddy bears she’s never touched. Every night she comes back here. Every night they may or may not lock the door – is this what home is?

If this isn’t home, what is? Memories she can’t quite grasp the edges of anymore? Aldous’ office, where she sits sometimes for lack of other option? The world she can see outside of the window?

Is home an outdated concept too? Has she outgrown it?

Rachel keeps her face blank and cuts these questions into methodical bites, chews through them, swallows them down. They’re gone. She goes back to the pile of papers on her bed. She sighs out through her nose, flips impatiently through the rustling stack until she finds it: Sofia’s file. Sofia has been struggling with isolation lately, and they’ll need to switch in a new monitor. She’ll need a friend.

Sofia’s picture is pinned to the inside of the file. Her face is round with baby fat, her eyes are scared. She could be Rachel’s sister, if Rachel let her. Rachel reaches out her fingers and—

—turns to the next page, quick, before she can do anything else. She lifts her gaze to the mirror, sideways. Out of the corner of her eye she can see herself sitting alone. Nothing in the curve of her fingers looks especially desperate, so she sighs to herself and goes back to looking at the file.

viii.

Rachel could try to open the door at any time, you know. Surely it’s unlocked. She could open it up and leave, walk out of the DYAD Institute and into the dark of the city. She wouldn’t own it, but she would be a part of it. If that was what she wanted.

Instead Rachel lies on her back in the dark – she used to sleep on her side, but she doesn’t anymore. When you sleep on your side your back is always turned to something. Now her back is turned to nothing, and she dreams, and this is what she wants: the chance to own the world. And she’ll have it, all of it, as long as she doesn’t go through that door.

ix.

There are times when the loss of her hair surprises her all over again. The girl in the mirror stares at Rachel for a moment and then blinks, startled, before drawing a mask of composure. Some mornings Rachel stares at her for a long time, holding her breath to see if she’ll ever let that mask slip. No matter how long she waits the mask never slips.

The added benefit to staring at herself in the mirror is knowing that someone is looking back. There are days when Rachel constantly imagines someone is watching her, because it is some sort of comfort. There are days when she closes her eyes and imagines, in the dark, that she is alone.

But it’s only imagining, and she knows. She’d never be stupid enough to believe herself truly alone. Isolation is a childhood disease. She’s outgrown it.

Anyways.

Her hair curves dark around her face, emphasizing pockets of baby fat that – someday soon – she will finally lose. She imagines her grown self, the way her short hair will emphasize the sharp angles of her cheeks, her bones, her eyes. She’ll grow into it, surely. Someday in the future she’ll straighten her hair, put her lipstick on, and know exactly who she is.

Rachel watches the eyes of the girl in the mirror until she sees something in them that could be fear, or could be sadness, or could be loneliness. Then she turns away, and all of those things are gone.

x.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

xi.

The medical examination rooms are always colder than the rest of the building; it could be manipulative, and it could be that the doctors simply don’t notice. Both theories seem equally likely, based on the doctors Rachel knows.

Doctor Nealon is going grey. Just around the edges. When she came here all of his hair was brown, and he told her she would never be a mother. Now his eyes are narrowed in concentration as he pulls blood out from the inside of her elbows. She has good veins, he always tells her. Easy to access.

The first time Nealon did this, he frowned at her for a moment before rummaging in the cabinet in the corner of the room and procuring a box of cartoon-themed band-aids. She was seven. She’d told him she wasn’t a baby, and could use the same plasters everyone else used; he put the box back. The next time she was in that medical examination room she went to the cabinet and looked, and the box was gone.

The plaster on the inside of her arm is flesh-colored; when she leaves the room she’ll remove it, and throw it away, and wear long sleeves. For now she presses her thumb to it when Nealon’s back is turned. The pain is a small bright star and it holds and holds.

Are you using drugs?

No.

Do you smoke?

No.

Are you sexually active?

Yes.

Nealon looks up from his clipboard and looks at Rachel, eyebrow raised. Rachel looks back. He writes something down on his clipboard and it hurts, her arm, even though she’s taken her hand away.

xii.

It takes Rachel an hour to write out a new proposal for Sofia Jensen’s monitor: a girl at the summer camp Sofia will be going to. A bunkmate. A confidante, without the strings of a schoolmate or a neighbor. Sofia’s anxiety is high enough that she’ll have an easier time forming relationships if she knows she can disconnect whenever she’d like.

Rachel slips the proposal into Aldous’ inbox, right above the proposal someone else has written: who Rachel Duncan’s monitor should be, and why. Rachel knows her proposal is better-written. They always are.

Rachel’s current monitor is waiting for her outside of Aldous’ office. When she walks away, down the hallway, he matches her steps exactly.

xiii.

On Rachel’s twelfth birthday, Aldous Leekie gave her an antique copy of _On the Origin of Species_.

The first time she ever danced the waltz, it was with him; his hand was too large on her back, he wouldn’t touch her. His fingers trembled less than a centimeter away from her skin.

He didn’t say goodbye to her when she left for boarding school. She wasn’t even aware if he knew she was gone. She never asked. Once she came back they fell into their previous orbit, as if nothing had changed.

He isn’t her father. It seems unfair that Rachel has more memories of him than of the father who had actually chosen her. Sometimes, when she is falling asleep and she lets herself unpack dusty memories from their boxes, her father holds her hand with Aldous’ hand and walks along the beach with her telling her about seashells in Aldous’ voice.

It’s unfair. Rachel _knows_ that this is a childish complaint, but she carries it anyways. He isn’t her father. He doesn’t even love her. Why is he the one who stayed?

xiv.

She touches herself in the dark. She closes her eyes as tight as she can, until she sees flashes of colors that aren’t real. She tries not to think about anything.

xv.

She lines up rows of nail polish bottles in front of the mirror. She sets down her makeup in front of the mirror. There is someone else on the other side of the mirror. She places herself in front of the mirror.

Rachel has never worn lipstick before – she doesn’t know how to apply it. The twist of it out of its tube is terrifying, in its own way. She isn’t terrified.

She puts it on, and it looks wrong, and she wipes it off, and she starts over. She puts it on, and it looks wrong, and she wipes it off, and she starts over. On the other side of the mirror someone is taking notes on her. Rachel scrubs another tissue over her mouth; when it comes off it is smeared a dark purple-brown, and her lips hurt. She refuses to press her tongue to them. She picks up another shade. If she could scream, just once, it would fix everything.

xvi.

Aldous stares at her when she opens the door to her room. Rachel is not anything but her own eyes watching, remembering this moment as hard as possible so that she can pick it apart later. The moment goes too-bright with memory: Aldous’ eyes going to her mouth, the way his own mouth tightens with something that could be sadness or pride or disappointment. His knuckles on the briefcase that he’s holding. Rachel’s knuckles on the doorframe. Both sets of knuckles the same color.

“Are you ready?” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and she walks through the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Fifteen minutes end, my time begins  
> I'll take all of the attention  
> And I'll take it alone
> 
> Quit trying to claim me  
> Lately  
> You're fronting like you made me  
> But baby  
> Your moves are too soft  
> \--"You Made Me," Dev09
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
